Quoting Dmitry E. Oboukhov (unera@debian.org):
> PW> As an example of the practical effects of flags in the context of
> PW> Debian; a number of years ago we lost our kernel maintainer, partially
> PW> because KDE in Debian included a flag of a country the maintainer (and
> PW> his government) disapproved of. A team formed to replace him, but
> PW> losing contributors still sucks.
>
> Hgm..
> When I saw KDE (it was 1.xx version) it contained lang switcher which
> used flags as language indicator. What happened to it? How is this task
> resolved now?
Paul is slightly wrong in his example. We lost the kernel maintainer
because he was thinking that using a compromise in the iso-codes
package to have a common name for TW that is "Taiwan" and not the
official "Taiwan, Province of China" name....was offensive for him and
China "mainland" people (while having "Taiwan, Province of China"
only was offensive to citizens of the island that everybody in the
world names "Taiwan").
So, nothing to do with flags, indeed. But, besides the underlying
problem (that has no "good" solution), that example shows that
anything related to political geography is highly sensitive. And, for
this, Paul's example is correct.